Automatic Processing as a Function of Age and Reading Ability

Abstract

GUTTENTAG, ROBERT E., and HAITH, MARSHALL M. Automatic Processing as a Function of Age and Reading Ability. CmLD DEVELOPMENT, 1978, 49, 707-716. Early and late first-grade children, third-grade poor and good readers, and adults named pictures under several interference conditions: with embedded intracategory or extracategory words, pronounceable or nonpronounceable letter strings, and visual noise. Interference attributable to word category was found for all groups except the early first grade. Interference from letters was found for all groups except a subgroup of 5 early first-grade children who also made errors on a picture-word matching task. Only adults and third-grade good readers were reliably affected by whether the nonword letter strings were pronounceable. It was concluded that even children who are poor readers and normal children with only 9 months of formal reading instruction extract meaning from familiar printed words automatically. The results are also discussed in terms of the relation between controlled and automatic processing of letters and words and the role of automatic decoding in the reading comprehension deficit of poor readers.